The Bookworm: Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere
Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, by Lucas Mann. 318 pages. Vintage Books. 2013.
No, they do not cry. And that is a rather stupid question. There is no rage, either. Even the throwing of a chair or of a punch is somehow unmanly in this context, and everything that these men have been taught about how to be takes hold, instinctively. Still, I don’t understand how someone can smash his plastic helmet on the cement of the dugout floor until it cracks as a response to hitting a fly ball to center instead of a home run, but repress every instinct to make noise one last time when he is told that he is insufficient, when it is ended. (p. 121)
Major League Baseball’s 2018 regular season was extended one day to crown the NL Central and West division champions Monday, giving me a fitting opportunity to finish Lucas Mann’s Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere before the playoffs start. After all, it’s Fear Street season!
Hailed as “literature’s answer to Bull Durham” by the Boston Globe review blurb on the front cover, Class A chronicles the Clinton LumberKings’ 2010 minor-league baseball season. A student at the UI’s Nonfiction Writing Program at the time, Mann embeds himself with the team and a group of loyal fans, profiling the coltish players, documenting the trials and tribulations of the young jocks and those who follow them, and sketching life in professional baseball’s smallest market.
I read a review of Class A in the Little Village when the book was released, and it had been on my mental reading queue ever since. A fan of baseball and nonfiction, I was eager to read it, expecting a rollicking baseball version of Friday Night Lights or the chronicle of a real-life version of Bull Durham. (Despite the fact I wrote that I don’t have many favorites, I think Bull Durham is my favorite baseball movie.) Though parts of Class A did meet my expectations, it is an overall disappointment. Overwrought and overthought, it truly is literature’s Bull Durham. It’s not what I thought it would be. It’s more poetry than reporting—and I use poetry as a derogatory term.
Mann does a good job of profiling the team, players, and Clinton, a city I knew very little about before reading Class A. I did not know it was once one of the lumber capitals of the world (which explains the LumberKings name) and that an unsuccessful strike at the Clinton Corn Processing Company in 1979 and 1980 changed the city’s fortunes. Mann paints Clinton as downtrodden, depressed, and boring, a slowly dying town where everything revolves around the massive Archer Daniels Midland corn-processing plant, which belches all sorts of smells that taint the air. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s where young men begin the pursuit of major-league dreams.
Mann does not jell with the team or fans at first. He is an outsider and everyone is suspicious and reserved. His initial interactions are awkward but real and honest, revealing the craft of observation; he does not hide his clumsy first steps. Over time, many warm to him and give him access to their lives. He hangs out with the players in the locker room and at their apartments, drives them around town and drinks with them at bars; he visits the fans at home and travels with them to away games in Davenport, Burlington, and Cedar Rapids. His intimate interactions provide rich details and insights. The most engaging and effective chapters are “The Pzazz!”and “The Collector,” where Mann engages with the players, coaches, and fans one on one.
Unlike Bissinger, who is (if I remember correctly) nonexistent in his reporting for Friday Night Lights, Mann is omnipresent in Class A. The reader experiences everything through his perspective. In that sense, much of Class A is more memoir than journalism. Mann is more participant than observer, and the book becomes more about him and his quest to write about the team and fans than about the team and fans. Mann also incorporates a lot of his personal history into the book: his experience playing baseball, the mutual interest in the game he shares with his father, and an older brother who died. Kudos to Mann for sharing personal details, and he does a good job of staying on subject and tying them into the overall project, but they sometimes feel gratuitous.
Class A features a lot of useful repetition and consistency of facts, symbols, and references, reminding readers of or emphasizing important details. However, the writing does not flow, which really vexed me. The first 50 or so pages are difficult to read; it is hard to become accustomed to Mann’s writing style. The writing is not rough or lurching, but the syntax is lacking. It’s not always like that, but much of the prose lacks rhythm. It is agonizing and becomes hard to finish.
Mann has a bad habit of being way too verbose. He overanalyzes everything, turning the fast infield dirt into mud by trying to tease meaning and symbolism out of every movement, word, and action, which is why Class A can unfortunately be considered literature’s Bull Durham. Mann tells a lot more than he shows.
The tone feels judgmental and patronizing. It borders on condescending at times, which angered me. Mann is a New York City native who describes Iowa as “flat” (p. 87), which reflects poorly on his observational skills. (I distrust anyone who calls Iowa flat. It may not have mountains or be extremely hilly, but it’s not flat.) I think he betrays a feeling of superiority to the state and its people. In that way, Class A often smacks of anthropology, like Mann’s visiting a strange land and people to study their ways and culture. To his credit, he becomes protective of the people he meets in Clinton, chastising his friends’ derision, but he comes off as judgmental and disapproving. Mann notes that the players “include Clinton as one of the things they overcame (p. 285),” and I get the sense that he feels the same way.
The end is much more of what I thought the whole book would be: an account and inside story about the team, the pivotal moments of the season. Mann travels on the team bus back to Clinton after the LumberKings lose the Midwest League championship series, describing the mood and minor but telltale events that speak volumes about the players and camaraderie. That’s what I wanted, the baseball version of Friday Night Lights. But that’s not what Class A is. Of course, I wonder how much of that reflects on the nature of minor-league baseball. It is very different from other leagues and team sports since players come and go all the time; how much camaraderie and team ambition can develop when everyone is auditioning for bigger roles? It’s not like everyone wants a state championship, like in Friday Night Lights. The only people who seem to care about the playoffs in Class A are the fans.
Though it was not what I thought it would be, I’m happy that I finally read Class A.
